November 24, 2008

René Raoult, l'Église verte/the Green Church

In it's early years known as the Église Verte (the Green Church) and currently as the Jardin de Pierre (Stone garden), this art environment, located in the interior of Brittany, France, has a spiritual connotation.

Life and works

René Raoult (b. 1942), a man from the breton countryside, who had all kinds of professions such as butcher, baker and healer (magnètiseur, in french), in 1968 as a self-taught artist also began creating wooden sculptures.

In the summer of 1984 something happened that would strongly influence his artistic production. A friend came by and informed him that in the woods a tree had fallen down. Raoult went to take a look and was fascinated by this fallen tree in which he saw a Christ laying on the ground..

He decided to sculpt the tree into a totemlike impersonation of the Christ and on July 14, 1984 this eight meters high sculpture was installed on a plot of land near his house along a departmental road in the community of Pléhédel in Brittany.

That night Raoult understood he had to equip this single sculpture with a surrounding protective shelter, kind of a churchlike structure. So he continued making totems. altogether nineteen big wooden sculptures, some six meters high, which he arranged in a circle like pillars in a cathedral.

These pillars have names, such as mother...father...moon.. sun.... Situated in between the pillars decorated granite blocks symbolize the elements.

postcard

French travel-writer Claude Arz, who is known as writing about "mysterious France", has published an interview with Raoult (conducted around 2006) on his weblog. Here is a translation into english of a quote from that interview, which might be rather characteristic of Raoult's views.